AWS

Amazon RDS io2 Block Express volumes are now available in all commercial regions, except and AWS GovCloud (US) and AWS China regions. Amazon RDS io2 Block Express volumes provide consistent sub-millisecond latency for mission critical workloads.

Amazon RDS io2 Block Express volumes are designed for all your critical database workloads that demand high performance, high throughput, and consistently low latency. io2 Block Express storage has the lowest p99.9 I/O latency and the best outlier latency control among major cloud providers, making it ideal for the most I/O-intensive, mission-critical database workloads. io2 Block Express supports 99.999% durability, up to 64 TiB volumes, 4,000 MB/s throughput, and up to 256,000 Provisioned IOPS for your most demanding database needs for the same price as Amazon RDS io1 volumes. You can upgrade from an Amazon RDS io1 volume to an Amazon RDS io2 Block Express without any downtime using the ModifyDBInstance API.

To learn more about Amazon RDS storage, visit the Amazon RDS User’s Guide. Create or update a fully managed Amazon RDS database with an io2 Block Express volume or modify an existing io1, gp2, or gp3 volume type without disruptions in the Amazon RDS Management Console.

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Customers can now use Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1 in Amazon Bedrock. Claude Opus 4.1 is Anthropic’s most intelligent model to date and an industry leader for coding and agents.

Claude Opus 4.1 is a drop-in replacement for Opus 4 and delivers superior performance and precision for real-world coding and agentic tasks. Its advanced coding capabilities include independently planning and executing complex end-to-end development tasks while adapting to your style and maintaining high quality. The model also offers improved frontend code generation, delivering strong visual output quality with a focus on effectively handling complex logic. Opus 4.1’s long-horizon task handling and complex problem-solving abilities make it an ideal virtual collaborator for sustained reasoning and long chains of actions. It also enhances AI agent performance, enabling agents to tackle complex, multi-step tasks with peak accuracy. Anthropic believes Opus 4.1 shines in agentic search and research, content creation, memory and context management—allowing for comprehensive insight synthesis, high-quality content production, and effective summarization.

Claude Opus 4.1 is now available in Amazon Bedrock in US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), and US East (Ohio). To get started with Claude Opus 4.1 in Amazon Bedrock, visit the Amazon Bedrock console, Anthropic’s Claude in Amazon Bedrock product page, and the Amazon Bedrock pricing page.

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Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS), allowing you to run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) directly within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). With Amazon EVS, you can leverage the scale, elasticity, and performance of AWS while maintaining your familiar VCF software and existing skills, eliminating the need to re-platform or re-factor applications during your migration.

Amazon EVS offers you choice, control, and flexibility in managing your VMware environments. You can self-manage your infrastructure or leverage the expertise of AWS Partners to manage and operate your VCF environment on AWS. The service allows you to retain control over your VMware architecture in the cloud with full administrative access to your environment. Meet your unique needs as you optimize your virtualization stack on AWS and integrate preferred external storage, backup, and disaster recovery solutions. You can also take advantage of flexible consumption models, including on-demand, one-year, and three-year options, enabling cost optimization. Amazon EVS combines the benefits of AWS with a ready-to-use VCF environment so you can migrate, scale, and optimize with over 200 fully featured services, from advanced generative AI capabilities to foundational compute, storage, and database services. With license portability entitlement, you can bring your VCF licenses to Amazon EVS. The service currently supports VCF version 5.2.1 and runs workloads on i4i.metal instances.

Amazon EVS is now generally available in six AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland).

To get started with Amazon EVS, access the service through the AWS Console. For more information about features and pricing, visit the Amazon EVS product page and refer to the documentation to help you get started.

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AWS Parallel Computing Service (PCS) now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) for Slurm endpoints, enabling customers to run workloads in IPv6-only or dual-stack Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). This helps customers meet IPv6 compliance requirements.

PCS is a managed service that makes it easier for you to run and scale your high performance computing (HPC) workloads and build scientific and engineering models on AWS using Slurm. You can use PCS to build complete, elastic environments that integrate compute, storage, networking, and visualization tools. PCS simplifies cluster operations with managed updates and built-in observability features, helping to remove the burden of maintenance. You can work in a familiar environment, focusing on your research and innovation instead of worrying about infrastructure.

PCS support for IPv6 is available in all AWS Regions where PCS is available. Visit our getting started documentation to start using the feature.

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AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports VPCE endpoints that have been validated under the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3 program. You can now easily use AWS PrivateLink to access Elastic Beanstalk endpoints when you require a secure connection using a FIPS 140-3 validated cryptographic module.

FIPS compliant endpoints help companies contracting with the US federal government meet the FIPS security requirement to encrypt sensitive data in supported regions. To create a VPC endpoint that connects to an Elastic Beanstalk endpoint, see Setting up a VPC endpoint for Elastic Beanstalk.

This new capability is available in all AWS Commercial Regions in the United States. For a complete list of regions and service offerings, see AWS Regions.

For more information about FIPS 140-3 at AWS, visit FIPS 140-3 Compliance. To learn more about Elastic Beanstalk, visit the Elastic Beanstalk product page.

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Amazon OpenSearch Serverless has added support for backup and restore. System will backup all collections/indexes in the account automatically every hour. The backups are retained for 14 days and available to restore indexes using APIs. The feature is automatically enabled and does not require users to configure.

Please refer to the AWS Regional Services List for more information about Amazon OpenSearch Service availability. To learn more about OpenSearch Serverless, see the documentation. 

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AWS Resource Explorer now supports 120 more resource types across all AWS commercial Regions from services including Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Kendra, Amazon Sagemaker, and more.

With this release, customers can now search for the following resource types in AWS Resource Explorer:

To view a complete list of all supported types, see the supported resource types page.

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AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service that simplifies the collection, organization, and monitoring of industrial equipment data at scale. Today, we are excited to announce asset model interfaces in AWS IoT SiteWise, a new feature that enables industrial customers to define and maintain standardized properties and metrics across similar equipment and process types, while maintaining the flexibility to accommodate equipment variations. 

Prior to asset model interfaces, users needed to define properties, metrics, and hierarchies at the individual asset model level. This process becomes extensive when scaling to hundreds or thousands of assets. Now, users can create a standardized interfaces that define required properties and metrics across multiple asset types. These interfaces act as templates that ensure consistency in data modeling while still allowing individual assets to maintain their unique characteristics. The feature includes automatic property mapping, standardized metric calculations, and simplified rollup metrics management, facilitating data aggregation and analysis across entire industrial operations.

To support larger industrial operations, we have also increased service quotas for AWS IoT SiteWise Asset Model properties and hierarchies. This enhancement allows customers to scale their asset model interfaces more effectively. 

Asset model interfaces is available in all regions where AWS IoT SiteWise is available. Visit the AWS IoT SiteWise documentation and explore Asset Model Interface examples to see how this feature can be implemented in various industrial scenarios. For details on the new limits, please refer to the AWS Service Quotas console.

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Amazon CloudWatch now allows customers to automatically enable Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) flow logs to CloudWatch logs across their AWS Organization. Customers can create enablement rules in CloudWatch Telemetry Config that automatically creates flow logs for both existing and newly created VPCs matching the rule scope, ensuring consistent monitoring coverage.

With today’s launch, customers can scope rules that apply to the whole organization, specific accounts, or specific resources based on resource tags to standardize the configuration of VPC flow logs. For example, the central DevOps team can create an enablement rule to automatically turn on flow logs to CloudWatch logs for VPCs with a specific tags, e.g., env:production, and help maintain complete visibility into network traffic patterns. Enablement rules use AWS Config Service-Linked recorders to discover resources that meet the rule criteria and automatically enable them to ingest logs.

CloudWatch’s telemetry auto-enablement capability is available in the following AWS commercial regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), and South America (São Paulo).

Customers incur charges for configuration items of resource types using enablement rules, according to AWS Config Pricing. Ingestion of VPC Flow Logs will be billed as vended logs as per CloudWatch Pricing. To learn more about org-wide VPC flow log enablement, visit the Amazon CloudWatch documentation.

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Starting today, Amazon Lightsail is available in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region. This expansion brings the power and simplicity of Lightsail to customers in Indonesia and surrounding regions.

With this launch, customers in Indonesia and nearby countries can now enjoy lower latency and better performance for their applications while meeting local data residency requirements. The new Region provides access to Lightsail’s features such as instances, managed databases, containers, load balancers and more, all with the same simple, predictable pricing that Lightsail customers love.

Lightsail is available in these AWS Regions: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Jakarta, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo). To learn more about Regions and Availability Zones for Lightsail, please refer to the documentation.

You can use this Region through the Lightsail Console (accessed from AWS Console), AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS SDKs.

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Today, AWS announced that AWS Parallel Computing Service (AWS PCS) supports SPANK (Slurm Plug-in Architecture for Node and job [K]control) plugins, enabling you to extend and modify how Slurm schedules and processes your high performance computing (HPC) workloads without modifying Slurm directly.

Using SPANK plugins, you can now integrate AWS PCS with container technologies, implement custom monitoring of memory and I/O patterns, and dynamically modify job launches to enhance resource management. For example, you can use Enroot and Pyxis plugins to seamlessly run containerized machine learning and HPC workloads using images from Amazon Elastic Container Registry, Docker Hub, NVIDIA NGC, or other container registries.

This feature is available in all AWS Regions where AWS PCS is available. You can implement SPANK plugins by installing and configuring them on the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that power your AWS PCS compute nodes. The plugins will be dynamically loaded at runtime when jobs launch, providing a low-effort approach to extend Slurm’s functionality.

To learn more about using SPANK plugins with AWS PCS, see the AWS PCS User Guide.

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Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) has increased the maximum message payload size from 256 KiB to 1 MiB, enabling customers to send and receive larger messages through their Amazon SQS standard and FIFO queues.

Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Customer workloads have evolved, with use cases such as application integration, IoT, and artificial intelligence (AI) requiring larger volumes of data to be exchanged in individual messages. With this launch, customers can send and receive message payloads up to 1 MiB without needing to offload data or split messages.

In conjunction with this launch, AWS Lambda’s event source mapping for SQS has been updated to support 1 MiB payloads. This update allows customers to continue using SQS and Lambda together to process their larger payloads.

Customers can begin sending payloads up to 1 MiB today, across all AWS commercial Regions and AWS GovCloud (US). To learn more about Amazon SQS, see the Amazon SQS Developer Guide. To learn more about integrating SQS with AWS Lambda, see the AWS Lambda documentation.

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Mountpoint for Amazon S3 Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver now accelerates performance for repeatedly accessed data, adds support for Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) mount options, and simplifies logging and permissions management.

The latest version of the Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver (v2) introduces four key capabilities. First, it adds support for caching data across multiple pods. By using the new caching capabilities in Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver v2, you can finish large-scale financial simulation jobs up to 2x faster by eliminating the overhead of multiple pods individually caching the same data. Second, you can now run your Kubernetes applications on SELinux-enabled environments like Red Hat OpenShift. Third, it lets you use Amazon EKS Pod Identity to simplify how you manage access policies across Amazon EKS clusters, including cross-account access. Fourth, it simplifies how you access logs and get insights into your mounts by using kubectl, a command line tool.

To upgrade to Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI v2 driver, you can follow the installation guidance. You can install, configure, and update the CSI driver in the Amazon EKS console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), EKS Application Programming Interface (API), and AWS CloudFormation. For details on supported file system operations, visit the documentation.

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Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now supports 100,000 images per repository, up from the previous limit of 20,000. This change better aligns with your growth needs and saves you time from not having to request limit increases till 100,000 images. You still have the flexibility to request additional increases if you require more than 100,000 images per repository.

The new limit increase is already applied to your current registries and is available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more about default ECR service limits, please visit our documentation. You can learn more about storing, managing and deploying container images and artifacts with Amazon ECR, including how to get started, from our product page and user guide.

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Today, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) announces the ability to provision isolated tenants within a single SES account and apply automated reputation policies to manage email sending. With this enhancement, customers can create multiple tenants in their SES account, each with dedicated configuration sets, identities, and templates. This new feature helps customers detect and isolate deliverability issues within isolated email streams, preserving sender reputation and helping improve inbox placement with mailbox providers.

When customers specify a tenant while sending an email, SES now provides tenant-level metrics including messages sent, bounce rates, and complaint rates in real-time. If reputation issues are detected, SES can automatically pause the affected tenant to protect other email streams. Customers can control this automation with three reputation policy options: Standard (recommended) which pauses sending for high-impact findings, Strict which pauses for any reputation finding, or None for manual monitoring. SES publishes notifications to Amazon EventBridge when tenant status changes occur or new reputation findings are detected, enabling integration with existing monitoring workflows.

These new capabilities are now available in all AWS Regions where Amazon SES is offered.

To learn more about working with tenants in Amazon SES, visit the Amazon SES console or refer to the documentation for detailed instructions on creating tenants, configuring reputation policies, and monitoring tenant-level metrics.

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Starting today, AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory customers can extend their existing Active Directory domain into AWS with the new Hybrid Edition for AWS Managed Microsoft AD. This new capability provides customers with a managed service for their AD infrastructure extended in AWS, enabling a unified Active Directory deployment between on-premises, AWS Cloud and multi-cloud environments.

Hybrid Edition automatically handles replication and maintenance between your AD environments and AWS. This provides you a simpler way to migrate AD-dependent workloads to the cloud while maintaining your existing AD data. The service preserves all your existing access controls and group policies without requiring permission reconfiguration.

With this new capability, you can easily integrate with AWS services including  Amazon EC2,  Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) across multiple AWS accounts. The managed approach significantly reduces operational overhead and allows your team to focus on business priorities while AWS handles the AD infrastructure maintenance. You can also securely share administrator credentials for Hybrid Edition using AWS Secrets Manager, ensuring no human visible credentials.

For information on regional availability of the AWS Directory Service Hybrid Edition for AWS Managed Microsoft AD, please refer to the AWS Directory Service documentation, which will be updated with the latest availability information.

To learn more about how Hybrid Edition can benefit your organization, review Extend your Active Directory domain to AWS with AWS Managed Microsoft AD (Hybrid Edition) blog post or the AWS Directory Service documentation. You can start using Hybrid Edition for AWS Managed Microsoft AD in the AWS Management Console, through the AWS CLI, or via AWS SDKs.

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Amazon S3 Access Points now support tags for Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). S3 Access Points simplify managing data access to your shared datasets in S3 general purpose and directory buckets. With ABAC support, you can add tags to your access points and extend your tag-based permissions to new and existing users, roles, and access points. This helps eliminate frequent AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), S3 bucket, or access point policy updates, simplifying how you scale access governance on your shared datasets.

To get started with tagging your S3 Access Points, use the AWS Management Console, S3 REST API, AWS CLI, or the AWS SDK. ABAC support for S3 Access Points is available in all AWS Regions at no additional cost. To learn more about using tags for access points, visit the S3 User Guide.

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Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL now supports MySQL minor versions 8.0.43 and 8.4.6, the latest minors released by the MySQL community. We recommend upgrading to the newer minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MySQL and to benefit from bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MySQL community. Learn more about the enhancements in RDS for MySQL 8.0.43 and 8.4.6 in the Amazon RDS user guide.

You can leverage automatic minor version upgrades to automatically upgrade your databases to more recent minor versions during scheduled maintenance windows. You can also use Amazon RDS Managed Blue/Green deployments for safer, simpler, and faster updates to your MySQL instances. Learn more about upgrading your database instances, including automatic minor version upgrades and Blue/Green Deployments, in the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Amazon RDS for MySQL makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale MySQL deployments in the cloud. Learn more about pricing details and regional availability at Amazon RDS for MySQL. Create or update a fully managed Amazon RDS for MySQL database in the Amazon RDS Management Console.

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Starting today, Amazon EC2 customers can now force terminate instances that are stuck in the shutting-down state. EC2 Instances can get stuck in the shutting down state because of rare issues caused by frozen operating system or underlying hardware problems. When customers use force terminate, the instance will first attempt a graceful shutdown process. If unsuccessful within the timeout period, the instance proceeds with a forced shutdown. A forced shutdown may not flush the file system caches and metadata or run shutdown scripts before instance termination. Force terminate allows customers to recover resources associated with stuck instances such as vCPU Quotas or Elastic IP addresses without waiting for AWS intervention, providing greater flexibility in managing EC2 instances.

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Amazon Kinesis Video Streams (Amazon KVS) is now available in Europe (Spain), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Middle East (Bahrain) regions. Amazon KVS is a fully managed AWS service that enables you to securely stream, process, and store video and time-encoded data from connected devices. With the region expansion update, organizations operating in these regions can benefit from faster response times, stronger data residency controls, and reduced data transfer expenses.

Amazon KVS automatically provisions and elastically scales the infrastructure needed to ingest streaming video from millions of devices. Using Amazon KVS, you can store, encrypt, and index video data and access their data streams through easy-to-use APIs. Amazon KVS also enables you to quickly build applications for live and on-demand viewing, and take advantage of computer vision and video analytics through integration with other AWS services, including Amazon Rekognition Video and Amazon SageMaker. Moreover, Amazon KVS WebRTC offers fully-managed capabilities to support interactive and real-time peer-to-peer media streaming between web browsers, mobile applications, and connected devices.

To learn more, please visit the Amazon Kinesis Video Streams product page and the AWS Region services list for complete regional availability information. 

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